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March 8th Actions

There has been a call for an international day of action on March 8th, 2017, organized and planned by women in 30 different countries. The AAUP-AFT Executive Council has endorsed this call and wholeheartedly supports the US platform's labor rights plank (https://womenstrikeus.org/our-platform/). The IWD platform calls attention to the decades of attacks on "working women, women of color, Native women, differently abled women, immigrant women, Muslim women, lesbian, queer and trans women."

Labor Rights plank

Labor rights are women’s rights because women’s paid labor in the workplace and unpaid labor at home is the basis of wealth in our society. All over the world millions of women are forced to work for slave wages in dangerous sweatshops and other ‘hell factories’ that kill thousands every year. In the United States 46% of union members are women and a majority of them are women of color. All women, irrespective of citizenship status, sexuality or race, must have equal pay for equal work, $15 minimum wage, including for caregivers, free universal child care, paid maternity leave, sick leave, paid family leave and the freedom to organize a fighting union in the workplace. As working women who hold up half the sky we refuse to be divided over the kind of labor we perform, whether skilled or unskilled, formal or informal, sex work and domestic work.

Some suggested ways to show solidarity with women on March 8

The Rutgers AAUP-AFT faculty union has not organized or called for a women’s strike at Rutgers this March 8th, but we do want to build towards such actions in the months to come.